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Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you had some bad experiences, but do you really think that Apple makes products with "no engineering applied past experience"? Surely Apple's products have had faults, and it sounds like you've been bitten more than once. I don't blame you for not liking the company or its products. However, there are lots of satisfied customers, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believed that their build process and supply chain is not top notch.

FWIW, whenever I've had any trouble with getting support for Apple products, an email to sjobs@apple.com (now tcook@) solved the problem promptly. In my experience, the company does screw up, but if you bring a problem to their attention, they'll make it right.

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Yes I do - they are shit, so is their engineering and I'm not afraid to go against the grain and say it.

I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer i.e. most of the praise comes from new users with shiny toys. My father has just been screwed by his 1st gen iPad because some of the apps will no longer install and IOS6 is not available (to the trash it goes), his white iPhone 4S has proximity sensor issues to the point it's unusable and they refuse to repair it, my boss's MBP LCD inverter melted, we've got a cupboard full of 7 dead Mac Minis in the office, the old optical mice just didn't work (the one with the little ball) or the logic board fell out inside and lets not even mention the time capsule saga or the OSX update which fucked the filesystems on lots of machines (10.5.3).

There is a whole million miles of these problems out there and so far it's usually kept covered by the reality distortion field.

Build process fine. Supply chain fine. But the inputs to those is unadulterated crap.

Fuck, I don't want to have to complain - I want something to just work with no problems. Screw sjobs@ / tcook@ pandering. Just make some shit that works.

> I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer

Four MBPs, including a retina MBP. Couldn't be happier. Two iPads and two iPhones, switched to Android largely because of a new job and because I wanted a local environment for running vim.

See? Other people have anecdotes too. But I get that contrariness and the application of your own pet anecdotes over evidence is really fun, so continue, by all means.

I think what he's going for is that, had you kept your original MBP, you would be unsatisfied. Not saying he's right or wrong there.

However, I think it is fair to say that the majority of Apple fans often have a pretty frequent upgrade cycle. Consequently I don't think there are too many "long term customers" of Apple products in his sense of the word. I think Meaty is really going for "long term" customer as in - infrequent customer, keeping devices for long term.

I'd be "unsatisfied" because a slow processor, a 4GB RAM maximum, and a shitty GPU would suck, sure. I upgrade and sell my old machines on a yearly basis or so because paying a $300-$400 delta (sell the old one, buy the new one) is worth it to have something in the target area for Apple and for developers. There's no point for me in keeping older devices long-term because nobody really targets the trailing edge. I spend more on car repairs in any given year than I do on my laptop upgrades; it is just not a significant amount of money.

If "people who keep old stuff" was what he was really going for, he's doing poorly at describing it, because I don't think that "long term customer" doesn't mean "customer who refuses to upgrade for geologic eras" among reasonable folks. And I certainly don't think an ecosystem where newer devices are generally preferred is a symptom of "bad engineering"--more "engineering decisions he doesn't like." Every MBP iteration has made me much more pleased to actually use the machine, and that's the core of what matters.

You see with Windows, Microsoft targetted (or at least went WAY out of their way to accommodate) the trailing edge. hell, they even held support for many DOS programs for a long time. This pattern looks like it might be changing with Metro though.

Microsoft did, sure, but I'm referring more to application and game developers. The OS features are nice-to-haves to be sure, but if your applications are outpacing your hardware...

That's mostly fair, but gigantic multiplayer experiences have in general tried to target more modest min. reqs., like Starcraft II on the competitive side, or all of those East asian MMOs on the casual side.

Starcraft II actually really chugged on my 2009-vintage MBP. It was one of the games I was thinking of. =)

My Wife has my old MBP circa 2008. Its still runs surprisingly well - outside the new trackpad and larger size, I don't notice a difference using that compared to my current. While I like the T61 (alot), when I left my previous job I was given the choice of keeping either it or the MBP (both with similar specs). I chose the MBP and haven't regretted it once.

In my circle, I would disagree. I'm using a 6 year old Mac Pro, have a 2006 Mac mini as an HTPC, another as a fileserver in the basement. Our household has an original iPad, an iPad 3G, two iPhone 3GS used as ersatz iPod Touches for the kids. I did recently upgrade to the iPhone 5 from the iPhone 3GS, but that's because I don't want to be on a two year treadmill.

The only issue I ever had was with a balky videocard in the Mac Pro that would die after about 4 months of World of Warcraft. Apple was quick to replace the card twice without any troubles.

So everyone's mileage varies.

Since I recently upgraded to an SSD in the Mac Pro, and bumped up the memory to 32GB, I see no need to replace this machine until it suffers a serious mechanical failure. The only downside is that it'll forever be stuck running Lion.

If you have the right video card, you can get Mountain Lion running with these instructions: http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47

This worked for me with my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 w/ an ATI HD5770 graphics card. I do have an issue where it often doesn't come back from sleep, so I never put it to sleep, but other than that it's been flawless so far. I haven't spent any time looking into the sleep issue, maybe it's a solvable problem.

By strictly hardware performance standards, the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 did not deserve to lose support so soon, and are still more than adequate. Especially the 8-core versions, which have benchmarks higher than many 2012 Macs.

If you have a 4 core model: I researched putting in replacement CPUs a while back (but never went through with it). Replacing a CPU in a Mac Pro is not the easiest and is a bit of a pain from what I hear, but it is possible, and if you have 4 cores right now you can get a serious CPU performance boost with the right 8 core CPU upgrades (2 x 4-core CPUs, that is). There are many options that will will work. If you're interested, I can give you more details on which CPUs work.

I have the four core model; I'm not sure for my work flow that faster CPUs or more cores would really help much compared to the cost. My SSD upgrade has really given it new life in terms of responsiveness.

Thanks for the link to the workaround. Hopefully it isn't something that will get broken with updates.

Yeah, I'm a little concerned about updates breaking things. The good thing about this hack is that you don't have to modify your installed OS X system. If I understand correctly, the Chameleon bootloader emulates EFI64 and fakes OS X into thinking you booted an EFI64 system. So I think the likelihood of updates breaking things is much smaller than that of Hackintoshes, for example.

Nevertheless, I'm going to try to make sure I have a full backup before doing any major OS X updates. I also have both a Lion backup (as well as an old Snow Leopard backup) that I can boot up in case I need to.

I'm a happy long term Mac user. However, I've resisted buying first generation products, and I wouldn't buy Apple products without an option to cancel the purchase. I'm happy with the attention put into the product design, but not with their quality control. If Lenovo made laptops with touchpads that worked as well as MacBooks, I would switch. But no such luck so far.

The Thinkpad X1 Carbon has a nice touchpad with 2-finger scroll as well. The only (minor) quibble I have with it is that it only lets you go one direction with the 2-finger scroll (you have to swipe down for down--you can't reverse it like you can on a Mac.) Otherwise, it's very comparable.

Just to add to the anecdotal evidence bandwagon, I'm another very happy long term customer, with almost a decade of happy purchases. I've never had a problem nor experienced anything but excellent service. I've had iPhones replaced for free (without Apple Care), free repairs for faulty components in 2 MacBook Pro's (performed immediately and at no cost).

I don't blame you for you dislike of the Apple brand given how you've apparently been treated, but realize that your experience seems to be somewhat anomalous.

This may just be a difference in attitude. For myself, I would count having multiple iPhones and MacBook Pros replaced or repaired as a terrible experience. Good service is better than bad service, and occasional defects are unavoidable, but the iPhone is only 5 years old; multiple replacements within that span would give me doubts about a company (unless you're buying lots of them, e.g. if your at a company that supplies employees with phones).

Somewhat less anecdotally, I worked Helpdesk at a company ~3 yrs ago, and most of our employees had either Lenovo's (T61's, T400s) or MBP's. I didn't notice a significant difference in the failure rate between the two.

I would agree, but do note that one iPhone was dropped in a cup of tea, which I can't really blame on Apple, and the other on cement, which I likewise can't really blame on Apple.

The macbooks both had bad video cards, which I do blame Apple for. But one was fixed in less than an hour, the other RMA'd and returned in 48 hours. This after almost 3 years of continuous use. I can put up with 2 or 3 days of repair after that many years of trouble-free life.

This kind of service and reliability led me to buy an iMac from them as my work computer and I haven't had a single problem with it.

Had my first-gen Intel white poly MacBook for 5 years. Could've run it longer but a friend needed a new laptop so I passed it on.

Over 13 years I have purchased 8 Apple laptops, three iMacs, five iPhones, and two iPads. With the Macs I have had three or four minor problems from time to time (covered under warranty), and have also had several iPhones replaced due to accidental damage (some for free). All were first gen purchases.

During this time I've also owned three Dell laptops, an Acer, and a Thinkpad. The Dells were mostly study though one's motherboard died. The Acer was also OK but was stolen so I didn't get a full life out of it.

In short, I'm quite happy with Apple quality, and have no desire to move away from them unless there's a very compelling alternative to come.

IOS6 is not available (to the trash it goes)

It's important to dispose of iPads in an environmentally friendly manner. There are lots of toxic materials and metals in the PCB and other components, and the batteries can start fires or emit noxious gases. Rather than throwing it away in the trash, I recommend sending it to me for proper disposal.

A great example of "no engineering applied past appearance":

The strain reliefs on every power adapter they make start out horrible, they fray, they get a lawsuit, then they fix them to look "uglier" but actually work. Then they release a new power adapter that looks good but sucks again and the cycle continues.

I'm having trouble finding the lawsuit over the old powerbook connectors, so let's start with magsafe 1

Original magsafe 1: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4127 They got sued. This was the settlement. Note that every single magsafe power adapter i have frayed.

There is an article in an atlantic that quotes a supposed apple employee saying they knew this was a bad idea. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/why-apples...

(Obviously, i don't think this is reliable sourcing, but it's plausible)

Newer magsafe 1: These are the ones that are sideways and have a much larger strain relief, and look like this: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/why-apples...

Great, problem solved, less strain.

Let's look at magsafe 2: http://photos.appleinsider.com/12.06.11-MBP-3.jpg

Whoops, back to the same issue of cables mostly bent at harsh angles due to T shaped adapters, and a smaller strain relief. Admittedly, it's bigger than the original magsafe 1 strain relief, but I expect it's only a matter of time before these fray again.

But: many people have had no problem with any of these Magsafe designs, despite frequent use. Weird, huh?

It's not weird. Plenty of people have not had problems with aluminum wiring in their houses, even when screwed to copper fixtures. Others have had house fires.

The lack of a 100% instantaneous failure rate does not mean there was a good engineering design, or even any engineering design past appearance.

In the case of magsafe, the incidence and number of claims of fraying, actual wire melting, etc, was so high that it was very clearly "bad engineering". (You are talking about at least tens of thousands of adapters that were actually replaced after actual signs of failure)

The case was settled through ADR 6 months after ADR starterd, and included apple agreeing to replace all adapters that showed any signs of strain relief failure for up to three years from the date of the initial settlement.

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